Govt. Vehicles Used in Wisc. GOTV Effort?

It looks as if Wisconsin is a key player in the shady election day antics going on around the country today. Media Trackers claims to have discovered vans from the Federal Jobs Corps being used to drive voters to the polls in the city of Milwaukee.

A van with federal plates and driven by a Job Corps employee was seen pulling up to the small polling station at the Clara Barton Elementary School in urban Milwaukee shortly after 1:00 pm on Tuesday. A Job Corps administrator inside the polling place said the federal vans had brought approximately 125 Job Corps participants to the poll as of early afternoon.

The administrator declined to give his name. The Job Corps is a division of the United States Department of Labor, a cabinet level agency that reports directly to President Obama, who is up for re-election today and who has campaigned hard in Wisconsin in recent days.

Poll workers inside the location struggled to handle the extra traffic created by the Job Corps participants brought in from a nearby training facility. A number of them were first time voters who had to be registered using Wisconsin’s same-day registration procedure. At one point a poll worker had to be asked by an unidentified election observer to confirm that a would-be registrant actually lived in the precincts served by the polling location.

As a federal government program Job Corps’ vans and staff time are paid for by taxpayers.